While they’re indeed much more adorable than a stodgy, ol’ FeatureManager in SolidWorks, they won’t provide you near the amount of functionality to complete a drawing in record time. What could these powerful features be? Drawing features, accessed directly via the FeatureManager in a Drawing.
But the drawing’s FeatureManager is useless… just shows the sheets, right? Ahhh, NO. It’s packed with ways to make drawings easier to manage and here’s how you can use it.
It seems something has hypnotized many SolidWorks users into believing, or just accepting, that the FeatureManager in SolidWorks isn’t all that useful. Maybe it’s those dang cats. But it’s there, and there are a lot of ways drawings can move along faster by using a few commands via the FeatureManager.
At first it looks like it just sheets for the drawing, but if you expand each item, you’ll eventually see that your model, along with all the wonderful parts and sub-assemblies exist over there… for each drawing view too.
Some of these commands can be accessed on the drawing itself. However, these in particular are easier used through the FeatureManager. Most will be accessed through the Right mouse button (RMB).
- General Functionality
- Collapse Items – Collapses Feature Manager
- Tree Display – Allows you to shows names/descriptions of your model items
- Link external dim text– Adds text you add to dims back into your part or assembly
- Move… – Allows you to move the sheet form X and Y
- Blocks – Folder that allows you to view, insert and create blocks
- Annotations – Folder that allows you to quickly set option for annotations
- Move Sheets – Drag and Drop sheets to rearrange
- Set Lightweight to Resolve – Easily set all views to resolve
- Define Title Block – Set up a Title Block
- Delete Sheet Format – Removes the sheet format completely
- Set Anchor – Set table anchors for Rev, BOM and other tables
- Zoom to Selection – Quicker if you set up a shortcut key, but this is also available
- Move views to new sheet – Drag and drop views into new sheets
- Show Table – Right click on table to show them if hidden
- Parent/Child – View Parent/Child relation of parts/assemblies
- Component Line Font – Change parts to phantom or other line fonts
- Show Hidden Edges – show hidden lines of parts you can’t access on screen
- Hide Component – Hide parts you can’t access on screen
- Open Part – Open parts you can’t access on screen
- Zoom to Selection – Zoom to unknown parts in views
- Planes – Show planes to reference, move or resize
- Dimensioning – Expand to view planes/origins to dimension
- Show Sketches – Show sketches for reference of dimensioning
Sheets
Sheet Formats
Views
Tables
Model Items
Have any others? I’m typically against working from the FeatureManager as much as possible. That’s easier in the models with the available context menus, but for drawings, you can get a lot done from the FeatureManager… as long as you know what you can do with it. What other things do you use the Drawing FeatureManager for?